Gardiner Greene Hubbard - Legacy

Legacy

Gardiner Hubbard's life is detailed in the book 'One Thousand Years of Hubbard History', by Edward Warren Day.

In 1890, Mount Hubbard on the Alaska-Yukon border was named in his honour by an expedition co-sponsored by the National Geographic Society while he was president.

The main school building at the Clarke School for the Deaf, Hubbard Hall, is named after him in his honor.

Hubbard's house on Brattle Street in Cambridge (on whose lawn, in 1877, Hubbard's daughter Mabel married Alexander Graham Bell) no longer stands. But a large beech tree from its garden still (in 2011) remains. After he moved to Washington, D.C. from Cambridge, Hubbard subdivided his large Cambridge estate. On Hubbard Park Road and Mercer Circle (Mercer was his wife's maiden name) he built large houses designed for Harvard faculty. On nearby Foster Street, he built smaller houses, still with modern amenities, for "the better class of mechanic." This neighborhood west of Harvard Square in Cambridge is very popular. For construction dates of individual houses, see http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/refshelf/cba/h.html#hubbardpkrd and http://hul.harvard.edu/huarc/refshelf/cba/m.html#mercercir

To service his then-modern Cambridge house, Hubbard wanted gas lights, the then-new form of illumination. So he founded the Cambridge Gas Company, now part of NStar. While in Washington, he founded both the National Geographic Society and A.A.A.S, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of "Science" magazine.